


Entropy

by thedevilchicken



Category: Jurassic Park (Movies)
Genre: Bodyswap, M/M, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-07
Updated: 2015-07-07
Packaged: 2018-04-08 04:45:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4291317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sequel to <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/2821634">Chaos</a>. </p>
<p>The universe is increasingly unpredictable. Alan learns to like it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Entropy

**Author's Note:**

> Sequel to [Chaos](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2821634), which should be read first!

From the moment they first met, Alan was convinced beyond any shadow of a doubt that in Ian Malcolm’s head he was the centre of the universe. 

He read Ian’s book long after they’d left the island, years later because for a good long while he’d felt quite strongly about never seeing or hearing or even speaking about Ian Malcolm ever again in his life. It was after his little escapade on Isla Sorna when he did it, finally pulling the first book down from the bookcase in his departmental office, from the top shelf where he’d left it purposely as he’d have to stand on a chair to get it down. He almost fell on his way back off the chair, which he thought later should have been a sign to stop right there, Do Not Pass Go. But he settled down in his rickety old office chair, the one he wouldn’t allow the department to replace though they’d officially ruled it a health hazard, and he started to read. 

Billy didn’t completely understand when he came home late with three library books in the beaten up old knapsack that should’ve held his laptop and settled on the couch to read for the rest of the night. Of course, Billy had long since quit asking questions where Alan’s occasional odd choices were concerned and more or less just looked on amused by this. Alan passed him the first book when he’d finished it and they read together all night on the same couch, Billy’s legs resting over Alan’s lap, one or the other getting up to fetch fresh cups of coffee from the kitchen whenever they started to flag. They talked as they read, read the entertaining or particularly ludicrous passages aloud, shared knowing glances until they’d both read all of Ian Malcolm’s books to date and outside the sun was rising. It wasn’t the first time they’d had a night like that. It wasn’t the last.

“He still thinks he’s the centre of the universe,” Alan said, amused.

“If you follow his math, who’s to say he’s not?” Billy answered. 

After the first six cycles, Alan started to wonder if Ian hadn’t been right all along. 

When his time came, he was 86 years old to Billy’s 61 and still wondering daily how he’d ended up sharing a bed in a house in Montana with one of his former doctoral students, albeit the very brightest of them. He was still fighting fit in the end, took long walks in the sun every day, had a seat out under an awning on the dig site that he’d passed on to Billy when he’d finally retired. He still kept up on all the latest developments in the field, reading journals there outdoors on the tablet Lex had sent him for one birthday or another. Lex had three kids of her own by then, and her kids had kids. They all called him Uncle Alan and he sent them toys all shaped like dinosaurs. 

He wasn’t expecting to die that day, out in the sun with a flask of coffee in his hand, watching Billy work, but he’d had a good long life and a great career by then. He’d been on hand when Billy had discovered a whole new species of dinosaur, had still co-authored articles with old colleagues and new well into his seventies, and their shared bookcase housed copies of all the books and papers Ian Malcolm ever wrote. He was looking over a worksheet that one of Billy’s students had just handed to him, pushing up his glasses on the bridge of his nose, and then he wasn’t. In one quite literal blink of an eye, everything changed; he wasn’t in Montana, he was right back there in Jurassic Park. 

It wasn’t just a memory, that was apparent from the start. It wasn’t a dream, he hadn’t drifted off in his chair at the dig and let his brain wander back to Isla Nublar because even if it hadn’t felt absolutely, authentically real, his dreams never took him back to that particular moment at all but something altogether darker. His whole body was still flushed through with the adrenaline of that first moment in the jeep when he’d turned Ellie’s head to see the dinosaurs, the feeling acutely familiar though he’d forgotten that first rush in all that had come after it. This time the feeling faded quickly, superseded by something else entirely colder as he looked around, as he gauged his companions’ reactions. Only Ian Malcolm, the insufferable Ian who he’d last seen forty years ago, a second ago or somewhere in the middle, seemed to have anything like Alan’s confusion. 

“Slap me,” Ian said, so Alan did without a second’s hesitation, right across the face while Ellie gaped at him. It didn’t seem to help either them or the situation, but Alan had to admit it didn’t exactly feel bad to do it. Alan had no idea what was happening. Of course, it was hardly the first time in his life that had been the case.

He watched Ian try to leave and as he sat there in the car outside the T-Rex paddock later on that evening, because somehow in the mess that was this repetition it hadn’t occurred to him to decline the tour, he blinked and he was in the jeep again, thoroughly disconcerted. A few more hours, Ian evacuating with some bizarre disease that Alan suspected to be pure though well-acted fabrication, and he was back in the jeep _again_. He was pulled back there seven times, eight, over and again in rapid succession, a visceral turn of his stomach as he realised the ninth time, the tenth, what it was that triggered it each time. He watched Ian Malcolm die ten times as he tried to leave, fifteen, twenty, munched to death by raptors, gunshots to the head, and he knew then what was happening. 

Ian Malcolm was the centre of the universe. He had been all along. But somehow Alan didn’t feel inclined to give him the satisfaction of admitting he was right.

It took more cycles than Alan wished to contemplate for Ian to stop trying to be a hero and save everyone there on the island, to realise the way to make it out alive was to remember what had happened that very first time around. Alan started to acclimatise to the jarring feeling of returning at any moment with not an instant’s notice to the jeep and the sun and that amazing look on Ellie’s face as she saw what InGen had created. And when they left, when Alan went back to his work waiting for the penny to drop and to find himself back in the jeep, again, while he waited because by that point it seemed inevitable, he started reading Ian’s works again. Months passed, then years; he watched it change direction. He watched the improvements, the dizzying rationality, until Ian didn’t go to Isla Sorna and it all started again. He could have laughed or cried but by then the seat there in the jeep was just too familiar.

Alan told himself this wasn’t his problem to solve, that he didn’t have the expertise because that was all Ian’s, definitely his field, and he got on with his life each time they left the park thereafter. In one cycle he wrote children’s books, found an excellent illustrator and told stories about herbivores and carnivores just funny and gory enough to sell worldwide and make him rich, though that was hardly the point. He spent years on different dig sites, moved around the world, knew just where to dig on the next cycle through to amaze and astound all his colleagues. He used Ian’s shorter resets to study the park, the plants that fascinated Ellie every time around, the methods they’d used, the animals themselves. While Ian was flirting with Ellie, again and again until he was fairly an expert at it, Alan talked with the scientists and found out everything he could, not that he had any use for the knowledge except his own academic interest. And when it came down to it he couldn’t honestly blame Ian for trying things with Ellie; after all, he had no idea anyone else was cycling along with him and Ian was the one killing himself again and again to restart where he’d left off. The prospect didn’t seem attractive. He understood how Ian would need a distraction from it.

And then, once, for the very first time, Alan was the first of them to die. He had no sense of time there in the warm black limbo after death but when he blinked open into sunlight in the jeep once again, he was more than ready to live again. He preferred the instantaneous return quite vastly to that empty other place. 

Maybe that nothingness was the reason why he did it, the blank space he explored for seconds or years maybe drove him to it. The next cycle around he manufactured a reason to visit Austin where Ian still lived and taught when the mood struck, and he made a bet that someone with an ego like Ian’s couldn’t help but accept. 

“You can’t charm _everyone_ ,” Alan said, over syrupy pancakes there at breakfast. “I’m willing to bet on that.” He was willing to let Ian believe he’d come up with the idea to direct that vaunted charm of his at Alan all by himself. He thought it might be fun to watch. Every time they blinked back to the jeep it seemed a little more like they both needed the distraction.

It took years, but they had the time for that. It took years because first Ian tested out all of his charms there in the park where there was nothing much to lose and for the first time Alan almost understood how a gun to Ian’s head had become such a convenient reset switch. Alan didn’t make it easy for him, knew what to expect because he’d seen the way Ian had been with Ellie all those times and years and cycles before, let him flirt and frowned in response, let him ask questions, let him try out all the things he’d learned about Alan’s academic field in the years that they’d been stuck, the years they’d repeated. They had frustrating debates about the use of technology in paleontology where both would wind up irate and unable to be around each other and so Ian would hit reset in some new and interesting way. They’d argue like that was all they knew how to do, until they didn’t. 

Ian veered off script on their next cycle and then they were together out there in the park, running, the scenario the most different Alan had known it to be in a hundred or more cycles when they pushed up against trees, tugged at clothing stained with mud and blood and brought each other off in breathless laughter. He could almost forget they’d left Lex and Tim alone for this, not that it mattered at all because they’d be there again in the blink of an eye when Ian died again. It turned out Ian could be exhilarating in a way Alan had almost forgotten existed. Sometimes Alan didn’t feel the urge to kill him with his own bare hands, and that was a distinct improvement. 

He spent a whole new lifetime with Billy before Ian finally made a sensible play. He went back to Montana just like he had so many times before and then, after years, just like it always was, Billy came in from California as Alan’s new graduate student. He knew Ian was keeping an eye on him when six months into Billy’s doctorate, now so familiar to him he could have written the dissertation out from memory, they fell into a relationship. Billy transferred to another supervisor for the very first time because they’d made the leap so early, Alan no longer seeing why they should wait as if time had made propriety inconvenient. When Billy Brennan looked at him the way he did, Alan didn’t pretend not to notice. When they fell into bed the first time, Alan already knew every inch of him. Time had taken hesitancy, inhibition from him, too, but he found he still hadn’t tired of the way Billy smiled; it was warm and familiar, not hard to spend another life with him. Ian, on the other hand, came as a complete surprise. 

“You still think you’re the only one,” Alan said, hand squeezing Ian’s shoulder as they sat there, alone in the visitor centre where they’d been a hundred times before but never like this. And Ian laughed and cried for everything they’d had and hadn’t had in a lifetime or three that had ended and never begun. 

They talked about things that had never happened, about an anniversary they hadn’t had, about their first pancake breakfast in a café in Austin and books they both had yet to write. They talked about vacations where they dove into pools from clifftops and he knew Ian saw then how it had all made sense all along, defying death because death had no meaning for either of them. They talked about Ellie and how they’d both loved her, why Alan had never once in all those cycles tried to stay with her because he couldn’t stand a new, unfamiliar end to that relationship. They talked about Billy, how the very first life that Alan had led had been with him and then so many after. 

"We're all waiting," Ellie said, interrupting something there was no way that she could ever understand. "What have you two been doing?"

"We'll be right with you," Alan told her, and then they were. That time when they left the park they went together. They started the cycle as they meant to go on. 

Somewhere along the line it turned into a morbid joke once they both knew their little problem involved both of them. The first time was an accident where Ian tripped over books Alan left on the floor; his neck snapped loudly against their coffee table and then there they were again, _again_ , back in Jurassic Park. Ian retaliated in considerable style, setting him up to be eaten by the T-Rex like that was somehow acceptable behaviour and then, after the briefest or longest of pauses in that dark place Alan had come to know so well, they were there again, back in the jeep. The others all watched in horror as Alan found himself electrocuted by stray fences, as Ian tumbled down into the raptor pen. It was ridiculous. Alan suspected they should have taken things more seriously but there was just so little left they’d never done, so little left to feel ashamed of.

They took it out of the park after that, time and death and pain strangely meaningless the more times they hit reset and went right back to the start again. They lived in their own strange murder-mystery, thirty, forty, fifty times over, interludes that punctuated their long pseudo-lives together, horrifically amusing because no one else in the world knew what was happening but them. They watched the world consumed by dinosaurs more times than they could count, killed each other and themselves in ever more bizarre new ways, each outdoing the last. Until, one day, one unutterably strange day, they both expired at the exact same moment, side by side. And when Alan’s eyes opened, he wasn’t Alan anymore. 

Everything had changed in the blink of an eye and somehow also nothing had. He was sitting in a different position but they were still in that familiar place, the field on Isla Nublar with its blue skies and green grass except something in those colours was just so very slightly off. Then he looked at Ian and Ian wasn’t Ian. 

“Oh, hell,” Alan said, with Ian Malcolm’s voice. 

Ian dropped his head - his head that wasn’t really his - into his hands, and laughed. “Well, this is new,” he said. 

Ellie stared at the two of them like they’d both completely lost their minds and Alan supposed in the most literal of ways they had. But Ian was right; this _was_ new. It was different. It was exciting.

It took eight tries to leave the park because Alan had never played Ian’s part even if they’d discussed it more than once. He understood what he had to do but it was somehow difficult to do it, not just because he understood how painful Ian’s eventual, inevitable injury would be. He sometimes wondered how he did it time after time, how he lived with it after, but compared with being gnawed on by velociraptors it did seem fairly tame.

“Let’s just stick to what we know,” Alan said in the end, his accent still sounding strange with Ian’s vocal cords attached to it. “You stay with Ellie. I’ll go with the kids.”

Ian seemed unconvinced the idea would work, his usual expression of unconcealed doubt looking very off on Alan’s face though it wasn’t as if they had a deficiency of time to try it or a dozen other plans. But it worked; they left the island, knowing then it didn’t matter which body played which role. Suddenly all of Ian’s theories made just a little less sense than they had before, and their previous sense had been tenuous at best. Chaos had hit them out of left field again. Ian would need to take his research right back to the beginning, though of course Alan would be there to help.

Once they’d left, nothing seemed quite right. Alan felt too tall, disliked the way Ian’s hair tickled at his borrowed skin so cut it short while Ian was still in the hospital, tried not to be amused by the look he gave him when he saw what he’d done. Ian complained about the tug of an old injury in his shoulder that Alan had long ago learned to ignore. Even brushing his teeth felt different and Ellie couldn’t understand in those first days in Costa Rica in the hospital before they flew back to the States what exactly their new problem was, how they were suddenly so incomprehensibly close, when she came to visit and found Ian and Alan already talking at the bedside. Ian did a better impression of Alan did of him so he did all the talking. Alan figured he’d have time to learn. 

They spent two months apart, while they settled affairs, Alan finding he knew more than enough about Ian to successfully act the part and suspected Ian would find the same thing about him back there in Montana. And then they met there in Austin in that same café over the same damn pancakes they’d eaten so many times in years that hadn’t happened yet. 

“Dr Grant,” Alan said. 

“Dr Malcolm,” Ian replied. 

Sometimes Alan still had to look in the mirror to remind himself that he wasn’t, strictly speaking, Alan Grant. He didn’t need the reminder then when Alan Grant was sitting there across the table, opposite, wearing his clothes and smiling that vague smile that had used to be his own. He missed his body but he was still intrigued by Ian’s.

They went to the hotel where Ian was staying, the same place Alan remembered checking into all those years in the past and in the future, the same room where the second or third time they’d spent the night and somehow not left for another day after. Ian closed the door and stood back against it, like he was remembering another room, a conference, the first real day of another life they both remembered when Ian had first won their bet. Alan was always endlessly surprised by what they could both recall, that nothing seemed to get lost in the reset, that nothing bled out forgotten.

“Ian,” Alan said, like he was reminding himself. 

Ian shook his head, pursed his lips in the way Alan had had to train himself not to do in Ian’s body. “ _Alan_ ,” he said, and gestured vaguely at him. “ _You’re_ Ian.” And Alan chuckled because he knew precisely what Ian had in mind because he’d always been at least a little perverse around the edges. He should have expected it but somehow life still knew how to surprise him; chaos liked to throw them the occasional curve.

They learned each other’s bodies slowly, applying what they knew of themselves and finding how different it felt to have familiar hands there in familiar places, how much they’d taken their own sensation for granted, how his own hands with Ian in them seemed like someone else’s as he’d never paid them much attention. Ian or Alan or whoever he was pushed inside him and that was new and wasn’t. 

They stayed together, moved Alan’s things to Austin, left the dig to Ellie who was a better project leader anyway. They spent weeks walking into things while they unlearned lifetimes of their own personal foibles and even then, for years, for the rest of their lives there were times that they lapsed. Ian started teaching archaeology there in Austin in the fall and Alan stepped straight into math; they’d been around each other for so long that it very nearly just felt natural to do it. Alan took up chaos theory, took up computing as a complement in spite of himself, learned how to act like Ian as well as talk like him, learned how to be a parent and some kind of rockstar academic along with it; he guessed Ian’s body remembered how to do it in a way even if Alan inside it didn’t. He worked just as hard on their problem as Ian ever had. In the end he even got used to the clothes. 

“One of us has to go to Isla Sorna with Sarah,” Ian said, one night, when the date was getting closer. “Probably me.”

Alan nodded, paused from grading papers, papers that were technically Ian’s but also Dr Alan Grant’s and somehow along the way the distinction had started to blur. They did each other’s work, or worked together, in notebooks they shared or whiteboards or windows covered in formulae that tried to make sense of how they’d ended up this way. Somehow their handwriting had leant into a strange amalgam that no one could tell apart, even them. 

“Don’t die this time,” he told him, wry. “I want to see how this life turns out.”

He didn’t die. When the Kirbys approached Ian sometime after that, Alan went with them instead and somehow he didn’t die either. They were, by then, the leading authorities on how to survive many and varied dinosaur-related perils; it was so very nearly an art form for them both. Alan suspected in a few more cycles it wouldn’t matter which of them did what, which body was whose, whose life was which. Their memories didn’t bleed out into oblivion, they just bled into each other, two systems with an ebb and flow of entropy they shared.

By the time they were sixty, seventy, they’d stopped trying to keep their roles straight even in their heads; they died in old age calling each other by the wrong name or the right name and they woke back in Jurassic Park. Alan wasn’t sure who he was just in that moment and wasn’t sure that it mattered because he knew right then he was wrong: Ian Malcolm _wasn’t_ the centre of the universe. They _both_ were, the two of them in cycles, by turns, through theories one Ian or the other had put down on paper or on glass walls in houses they’d shared through more lives than they could count. One would wait for the other in the space that sat between lives and then they’d both begin again, into infinity or until they worked out how to end it, if they ever did. They wouldn’t stop trying, or maybe one day they would.

“Well, here we are again,” Alan said, though no one else in earshot would understand the meaning.

Ian chuckled. “I don’t think we ever left,” he said.

Alan didn’t say he thought they never would and so he smiled because he knew despite it all he didn’t want to. Chaos had followed them wherever they’d gone, and it always would; he found he looked forward to its next strange curve.


End file.
